Now that former President Donald Trump has named U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, as his running mate in the White House race, concerns are emerging over Vance’s stance on race in America.
The first-term Republican senator is a staunch supporter of Trump’s right-wing Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement and has publicly come out against immigration as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
“JD Vance has made clear his positions on a lot of different issues that impact people of color, that impact Black people,” Markus Batchelor, national political director at People For the American Way, a progressive advocacy group, told Black News & Views.
“He is willing to give ground to some of the most extreme elements of the right-wing, which implicitly and explicitly are a threat to Black Americans,” Batchelor said.
Trump named Vance as his vice president pick on Monday as the Republican National Convention got underway in Milwaukee. It comes at a time when America’s tensions on race have reached a critical level, and as many Black Americans have worried that the return to a Trump White House will mean a rollback of racial advances.
Vance has pursued a course comparable to that of conservative activists associated with America First Legal, a right-wing public interest group that challenges DEI efforts. The group has initiated litigation against the National Football League, McDonald’s, and other entities.
Vance has pressed forward with anti-DEI advocacy despite a recent survey by the Pew Research Center that showed 56 percent of employed U.S. adults perceive the emphasis on promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace as beneficial.
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In an interview with conservative commentator Glenn Beck on “The Glenn Beck Program” in June 2024, Vance maintained that removing DEI programs is a way to put “merit back in our federal system.”
In that interview, the Ohio lawmaker went on to explain that the Senate is responsible for appointing people to federal roles and that it is important to choose people “who are aligned with the agenda.”
Vance argued President Biden wouldn’t support any legislation against DEI, whereas Trump would destroy any of “the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy that exists in our country.”
And after last summer’s landmark Supreme Court decision that deflated the use of affirmative action in higher education admissions, Vance wrote the presidents of Princeton and Harvard to reprimand them about what he called their “open hostility to the decision and seemed to announce an intention to circumvent it.”
In his letter, Vance referenced the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that in effect desegregated public schools. He wrote that Brown encouraged “massive resistance,” which led to “racial animosity.”
Asked if Vance’s legislation to “crack down on unlawful discrimination in higher education” related to Project 2025, a right-wing initiative being talked up by Trump supporters, Batchelor said Vance has been “very clear that he likes Project 2025.”
“JD Vance, for sure, has been vehemently what he calls anti-DEI, working to ban companies who use the programs from working with the federal government,” Batchelor said. “It is a point in the project. It is a point in the Republican platform. It is a main tenet of Project 2025. [It is] an endorsement that makes his views very clear.”
Project 2025 is explained in a nearly 900-page handbook released in 2022 by the conservative Heritage Foundation that serves as a blueprint for an upcoming GOP administration. Its goal, among others, is to undo the Biden administration’s policies like firing federal workers who “engage in ideological agitation” against DEI, the report read.
In the same year Project 2025 was released, Vance introduced The College Admission Accountability Act, a bill that cracks down on supposed “unlawful discrimination in higher education.” It essentially appoints a monitor to provide oversight of universities when they review applicants from minority backgrounds. His reasoning is to protect applicants’ “constitutional rights and comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.”
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The Democratic National Convention chair Jamie Harrison on Monday slammed Vance as Trump’s VP pick, calling out his far-right agenda and saying, “JD Vance embodies MAGA – with an out-of-touch extreme agenda and plans to help Trump force his Project 2025 agenda on the American people.”
In 2024, several issues relating to race in America are at stake, and the author of the autobiographical and hugely successful “Hillbilly Elegy” – along with his ticket mate, former President Trump – plan to have the largest immigrant deportation in U.S. history, a promise emphasized at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Gaining entry into the United States has already been a challenge in particular for African students, according to a report from the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration on disproportionate F-1 visa denials. Vance would be joining Trump, who once referred to Haiti and African nations as ‘sh*thole’ countries, in cracking down on barring entry to people from other places.
“We’ve seen a far-right Supreme Court overturn affirmative action,” Batchelor said. “It’s a preview of what’s to come if we elect Vance and Trump to the White House.”
